April 24, 2008

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Is Offensive Hyperbole For The Goose, Offensive Hyperbole For The Gander?

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 5:29 pm

Recently, Gerry Bracey published a piece at the Huffington Post which compared the authors and supporters of No Child Left Behind to the Nazis at Nuremburg.

There was understandable outrage, from Alexander Russo at This Week in Education and from Kevin Carey at The Quick and The Ed. Carey wrote:

One wonders: is there anything someone can say that’s so patently offensive and obviously deranged that it precludes further participation in respectable conversation? I guess we’ll find out.

Today, Checker Finn published a defense of the A Nation At Risk against critics Richard Rothstein and Larry Mishel, both of whom had taken the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its publication to dispute the report’s claims about the American economy and education. [Rothstein here; Mishel here.] In exactly the same fashion as Bracey’s post, Finn opens that defense with an analogy between those who deny the accuracy of the claims in A Nation At Risk and those who deny the existence of the Holocaust, of Stalin’s Gulag and of the AIDS virus, among other things.

It will be interesting to see if a statement “so patently offensive and obviously deranged” on the part of Finn garners the same response that Bracey received. No less interesting will be the conclusions reached: should such statements on the part of Finn “preclude further participation in respectable conversation?”

Enquiring minds need to know.

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  • [...] Casey repeats the BS. Posted in NCLB by preaprez on April 26th, 2008 Leo Casey at Edwize claims that Alexander Russo and Kevin Carey expressed “understandable outrage” at [...]

    Pingback by UFT’s Casey repeats the BS. « PREA Prez — April 25, 2008 @ 10:30 pm

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